Dear friends,

In the beginning of the adventure that has become On Being, I wanted to create a new kind of conversation in public about religion, spiritual inquiry, and the pursuit of meaning in human life. Lately I’ve been pondering all the learning and evolution and surprise of these two decades — seeing how so much that has become defining has been emergent all along. I did not imagine how important and thrilling conversation with scientists would become — what a revelatory companion science would be in this century for walking with the ancient, enduring question of what it means to be human. I did not foresee that poetry would find a place at the heart of this project, though I knew that poetry rises when we need fresh words to recall the mystery of ourselves and reach across to the mystery of each other. I did not guess at the existential challenges that would catalyze this young century, and how they would make the question of what it means to be human inextricable from the question of who we will be to each other.

And I could not have fathomed how profoundly and creatively the people who find their way to On Being would take this project into their lives and communities. What I think of as the beautiful, far-flung On Being universe has always felt less like an audience than a community, indeed like an ecosystem that wants to be activated. And that is one way to speak of the aspiration we’ve set for ourselves for the time ahead. Recently, a wonderful friend and partner in this transition asked me if I could lay out “the big, hairy, audacious goal of the project” as it is now unfolding. I’ll share with you what I wrote to him.

It is to make our offering — as generative and life-giving and creative and nourishing an offering as possible — towards this existential moment in the life of the world. Which, despite itself, is also brimming with magnificent possibility. To hold up a different kind of mirror to the beauty and grandeur — and reality — of those possibilities. There is such massive fracture and brokenness, and yes, violence, pain, and fear metastasized, and it is in some way presumptuous to assume we can make any kind of dent at all. 

But it has seemed to me across these years that On Being speaks to and touches people in an unexpectedly grounding and softening and mobilizing way. That our insistence on taking seriously the human and cosmic questions is a unique response to being alive in this time. That it’s needed. And that we can keep offering up the adventure of conversation through the podcast, but I/we can also do more — more in mining the archives for models and teaching and inspiration and wisdom, more in creating tools, which we humans need so desperately now, and more in terms (perhaps paradoxically) of getting really present and close to the ground in particular places and communities and crises. 

This feels like calling. I've learned across the years that with calling, what you have to set absolutely is your intention, and you have to both trust in and let go of control over the results of your actions. I believe that we are planting seeds that will endure beyond me and the life of this project, and that's how the long arc of the moral universe works. 

There are so many words to name what this is about — manifestations of what will prosper if we get this right. Beloved Community is one of them. Critical yeast. (R)evolution, as Grace Lee Boggs said :) Emboldening the generative narrative of our time.